The argument of this book, that artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were motivated to depict biblical stories as a means to provoke viewers to reflect upon their moral significance, will not come to students of the period as a surprise. It may be, however, that art-historical interest in technique has occasionally distracted the attention of modern observers from the religious meaning of late medieval Christian art. To exemplify the way in which Christian doctrine has been translated into visual images, Jules Lubbock has selected a familiar line-up of Tuscan artists (a team first made collectively famous in the sixteenth century by Giorgio Vasari, who praised, similarly, their abilities as convincing and engaging story-tellers): Giotto, Duccio, Giovanni Pisano, Masaccio, Ghiberti and Donatello. Within these geographical and chronological confines, Lubbock has written a linked series of essays, each based upon close observation of particular works. Drawing attention to internal sightlines and external angles of vision – a constant and valid motif is the viewer's mobility in front of an object – he arrives at a number of thought-provoking reflections and insights.

Lubbock emphasises the textual basis of these images, which he sees as essentially doctrinal. This emphasis informs the visual analysis, in which depicted biblical narratives are said to be divided into ‘sentences’ and ‘chapters’. Without disputing the acknowledged intellectual content of medieval Christian imagery, one may take issue with a view which underlies this book and which is summarised in the conclusion thus: ‘the majority of the images we have examined tend to discourage direct emotional identification with the figures in them, appealing more to the understanding than the emotions’. Evidence of medieval viewers' response to images suggests that contemporary sensibilities differed from what we may assume to be normal. St Francis experienced a highly charged and transformative encounter with his God before a Romanesque crucifix which no modern observer would call emotional. One might equally debate the suggestion that the often admired restraint of the figures in Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes makes it ‘hard for us [sic] to identify with their feelings’. The gestures and expressions of the mourners in Giotto's Lamentation over the Dead Christ use classical and Byzantine motifs to achieve an effect which is emotive before it is doctrinally informative. More depends on the particular identity of the viewer than Lubbock has space to explore here. Although he states correctly that ‘Duccio's Maestà was the image upon which one's attention focused when one entered Siena Cathedral’, access to the cycle of the Passion on the reverse of the altarpiece, upon which Lubbock exclusively focuses in his discussion, was largely restricted to the canons of the church.

A strength of the book is the example of detailed attention paid to the works as material objects. The author rightly reminds us that photographs of images often fail to represent the viewer's angle of vision before the real thing. It is, however, possible to overstate this case. The photographs taken for this book of Giovanni Pisano's Pistoia and Pisa pulpits show the narrative panels from the viewpoint of one standing directly below them. These steeply angled shots are very dark, and do not live up to the claims made for them in the text. Lubbock would have made his point more effectively with photographs taken from a pace or two back from the monument, at what would arguably be a more natural viewing position. The question of angle is furthermore affected by the fall of light: it is unfortunate that both of these Pisano pulpits, and those by Donatello with which the book closes, have been removed from their original positions, seriously compromising this aspect. The former, at least, have also lost elements of decorated impasto and polychromy, which would have aided the medieval viewer. Enzo Carli once published a study which purported to demonstrate that photographs of sculpture could never be effective; Henry Moore brushed aside the fetishisation of the angled sculpture photograph; others have carried this debate forward, and will be interested by Jules Lubbock's contribution.

On the relationship between sculpture and painting some suggestive remarks are offered, and further thoughts are provoked. More work remains to be done on the interconnections between these arts in the decades around 1300. It is possible, but doubtful, that the angled distortion of fresco cycles which painters adapted to narrow chapels in Santa Croce in Florence shows that ‘Giotto and his successors had adopted Giovanni [Pisano]'s oblique perspective’. Regarding Masaccio, and his relationship with the sculptors Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, Lubbock reasonably stresses (in a somewhat protracted excursus) the secondary importance of particular perspectival methods for the construction of images by early fifteenth-century artists. Reproductions of the Brancacci Chapel frescoes from before the 1988 cleaning now look so sad that it is hard to understand why (except perhaps for reasons of economy) modern photographs were not used in this case. On Donatello, the logic of Lubbock's list of characters leads him to focus on this artist's response to Ghiberti's two sets of doors for the Florentine Baptistery. But Donatello's San Lorenzo pulpits were produced following the artist's stay in Siena, where he may also be thought, on the evidence of the pulpit panels, to have been particularly impressed by the treatment of biblical narrative in the Sienese painting tradition, from the Lorenzetti brothers onwards. On a range of issues this is a thoughtful book, which should have its desired effect: that of sending its readers back to the original works for a closer look.